Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week revealed that Australia’s major political parties were the target of a recent cyber attack. The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) identified a malicious intrusion in the Parliament House computer network. It was later discovered that the Liberal, Labor

Since 2005, the annual Lowy Institute Poll has been tracking the attitudes of Australians to foreign policy issues and their place in the world. The issue of boat people, unauthorised asylum seekers, irregular maritime arrivals, refugees – the politics is so contested that it is difficult to find

The aid industry is complex. Dozens of bilateral donors, hundreds of multilateral agencies, and thousands of non-governmental organisations litter the development landscape in all corners of the globe.
In aid jargon, this is known as “fragmentation”. Conventional aid-effectiveness literature

Deal or no deal
Global trade experts meeting in Australia this week have expressed some confidence that an interim deal will be reached by the end of the month.
As markets swoon amid the latest rumours about US-China trade negotiations, global trade experts meeting in Australia&

Australia’s decision on 28 January to formally recognise Juan Guaidó as interim President of Venezuela is a reversal of previously long-standing government policy to only recognise States and not governments.
Adopted by the Hawke government following a Cabinet decision in 1988, that policy has

With Hakeem al-Araibi now landed in Australia, returned from Thailand, what seems like a totally unnecessary crisis looks to be over.
After some 11 weeks of excruciating limbo, and with numerous heroic efforts here in Australia and elsewhere to free the refugee footballer, now vindicated, it

On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives passed a bill supporting the transfer of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru to Australia for urgent medical care. The bill, initially put forward by independent MP Kerryn Phelps in late 2018, provides expanded capacities that allow two doctors

Jackson achieves magnificently his professed goal of making a film about the human experience of the war.
The commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War were so regular that by 2018 a degree of commemoration fatigue seemed to have set in. Was there anything more than could be said

Australia created a $500 million loan scheme for Indonesia to support reconstruction following the 2005 Boxing Day tsunami. Australia lent a hand, forging stronger links in the process. But the loan scheme had its flaws.
As Australian ministers and officials currently tour the Pacific

The case of Saudi teen Rahaf Al-Qunun dramatically demonstrates the difficulties many refugees face when attempting to escape the risk of harm at home and find safety elsewhere – whether they travel by leaky boat, or through international airports surrounded by business travellers and holiday-

Australian pushback?
While millions of Chinese made an annual pilgrimage home for the Spring Festival, Huang Xiangmo, the Chinese property developer at the centre of Australia’s political interference scandal, had his Australian permanent residency and visa cancelled,

If cultural dynamism and persuasion can trump military might, as the adherents of soft power would have it, the South Pacific is the place to see this played out. Pacific island nations face choices like never before as China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the US, the UK, and France seek to exert

The Royal Australian Air Force announced last week that it has commenced flight operations with the first two of its new F-35A Joint Strike Fighters.
When the first full squadron of F-35s is operational in 2020, the Air Force will have made a substantial capability leap, particularly in “data

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has now established an Office of the Pacific, a measure foreshadowed in 2018 as part of Australia’s Pacific “step up”. Ewen McDonald, formerly High Commissioner in Wellington and a Deputy Secretary in DFAT, has been appointed head of the Office.

One of the planet’s great herd migrations is almost at an end for another year. Across Australia each summer, tens of thousands of people abandon sweaty cities in search of the cool waters along the coast, as the nation schedules a collective out-of-office message.
There is no need to reach back

At the Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship geopolitical conference held last week in New Delhi, Australia’s high-level presence was noticeable. Foreign Minister Marise Payne led the delegation from Canberra and was accompanied by Chief of Defence Force General Angus Campbell.
Campbell’s

Britain’s former foreign secretary Boris Johnson has called for the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to be rolled into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This would be a monumental mistake for a country looking for relevance in a post-Brexit world.
Over the past two

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison will visit Vanuatu and Fiji this week. He is the first Australian prime minister to visit Vanuatu since Bob Hawke in 1990 and the first to visit Fiji since John Howard in 2006 (both were for Pacific Islands Forum leaders meetings). Long overdue, the visits

The findings of two related government reviews – on international broadcasting, and soft power – should offer an incoming Australian government the potential of a substantial policy reset following the general election in May. Specifically, they may help clarify the purpose and place of state-

Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to Washington (1997 – 2003), observed that the United States had one special relationship, and that was with Ireland. The large and politically active Irish diaspora living in America make the relationship special.
Australia’s strategy of urging its

British think-tank, the Henry Jackson Society, recently released its Audit of Geopolitical Capability, which it describes as providing the “fullest picture of who’s up and who’s down on the international stage”.
According to the 2019 audit, Australia was up, ranked eighth in terms of

“Climate change is the greatest health challenge of the 21st century”. Such is the conclusion of the latest report by the World Health Organization (WHO), released last month to coincide with the COP24 climate conference in Katowice, Poland. The report makes clear that immediate action on

With an election approaching, a heady mix of personality conflict and pressure from polls – those suggesting an impending change of government – once again turned combustible for a sitting prime minister in Australia. Suddenly, in August, out went Malcolm Turnbull, and in came Scott Morrison,

In the aftermath of the Bourke Street attack in Melbourne last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced two updates to Australia’s citizenship laws: increasing power to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals, and a period of exclusion from re-entry of foreign fighters returning to

Australia has decided it is going to do a lot more infrastructure financing in the Pacific.
This is a welcome development. The Pacific faces some of the most difficult development conditions in the world and has huge financing needs, especially due to the effects of climate change. It is also

The first in a series where Lowy Institute experts look back on what surprised them in 2018.
If you had told me this time last year that in 2018 I would be one of the most frequently quoted Lowy Institute staff members in the media, I would have laughed you out of the room. Conventional thinking

Some, perhaps surprising, support from Bahrain to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s decision for Australia to formally recognise West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel while leaving Australia’s embassy at its existing location in Tel Aviv. According to a tweet translated by Al Jazeera, Bahrain’

If news reports are believed, Australia will on Saturday formally recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital while leaving its embassy to remain in Tel Aviv in an announcement to be made by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
If other news reports are believed, such a shift will be against the

This article is based on episode 10 of the Good Will Hunters podcast, featuring an interview with Clare Press, sustainability editor-at-large at Vogue Australia.
It’s known as “fast fashion”, clothes cheap to buy, yet costly to make, if the true labour and environmental

Ties between India and Australia have always been a little constrained – and unsurprisingly so, as traditionally there has been little to connect the two countries. For its part, Australia has for decades sought to have a better relationship with India, one that extends beyond shared democracy,

During the November APEC Summit, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the US will work with Australia and Papua New Guinea to develop the Lombrum naval base on Manus Island.
Analysts have debated whether the plan is part of a pushback against Chinese encroachment in the Pacific and how

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to Darwin was rightly billed as historic and “deeply symbolic”. It also delivered some substance, with the announcement of important deals on the financing of regional infrastructure and on deepening cooperation on maritime security. It did not

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme goes live on 10 December, when people or companies in Australia who are acting on behalf of foreign principals in the political sphere will have to register and detail their activities on a public website.
If it works as it is supposed to, the

In the Uighur-Australian communities of Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne, almost everyone can tell you a story of losing contact with family members in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China, known as East Turkistan to the Uighur people.
What is occurring in the Uighur homeland

A few weeks ago, when I heard about the proposal to encourage people to thank veterans for their service, I was moved to put my “veteran” hat on (something I rarely do) and write a strong riposte: "Would You Like thanks With That?". Then the farcical announcement by Virgin Australia hit the

Comparisons are inevitable.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s speech comes after a concerted run of major foreign and defence policy speeches, each laden with announcements as the major parties joust in unofficial campaign mode running up to the 2019 federal election.
First was the Opposition

Book review: Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq, by Patrick Porter (Oxford University Press, November 2018).
Clausewitz famously pointed out that war is a continuation of politics or policy by other means. Hannah Arendt wrote that “policy is the realm of unintended consequences”.
Patrick

When Tony Abbott became prime minister, he immediately went about implementing his policy of “turning back the boats”. This was in the face of warnings that the practice would not only cause a major diplomatic rift between Australia and Indonesia but the very real possibility of a

It is both apt and overdue that veteran ABC correspondent Sean Dorney was last night awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at the 2018 Walkley ceremonies. Judged by the trustees of the Walkley Foundation, this award not only recognises Dorney’s extraordinary body of work built over

The statements about the importance of the Pacific to Australia by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne, backed by the Foreign Policy White Paper last year, are most welcome. The further decisions announced at APEC last week did even better. The fact is, Australia has

China’s Ministry of Commerce announced on Monday that it would immediately start a year-long anti-dumping probe into imported barley from Australia. China is Australia’s largest export market for barley. In 2017, two-thirds of the Australian crop – 6.48 million tonnes, worth US $1.5 billion

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the establishment of the multibillion-dollar infrastructure development bank for the Pacific, the overriding sentiment was that this pivot to the South Pacific was designed to curb the rising Chinese presence in the region.
But is this renewed

In October 2017, Australia’s then foreign minister Julie Bishop officially announced Australia’s new $300 million regional health security initiative. This announcement and the size of the initiative took many by surprise, and has been largely welcomed by most commentators and several of our

With a series of state elections due and the federal election looming, there are important lessons that Australia needs to learn from the tone of US politics. In particular, there is a responsibility for Australia’s political leaders to act in ways that ensure, and do not undermine, the integrity

Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is scheduled to visit Australia this week on the heels of attending the ASEAN Summit. While there have been regular prime ministerial exchanges between Tokyo and Canberra throughout Abe’s long leadership tenure, there will be more at stake than usual on this

Scott Morrison’s recent response to Australia’s receding “voice” in the Pacific appears to be a Home and Away solution – namely, according to the Prime Minister, the provision to “our Pacific family” of more stories, news, drama, and sports from Australia’s commercial television

One of the most challenging aspects of Australia’s bilateral relationship with China is finding new ways to signal our interest in the big issues that are shaping the future of the region – a task almost as difficult as deciding amongst ourselves what those issues are.
The signalling of

The violence in Melbourne’s Bourke Street last Friday is still being investigated as a terrorist incident and, as with all terrorist incidents, the media and public are rightly eager for information.
While the authorities have been as open as they can be, this early in the process there

Arthur Culvahouse will be the next US ambassador to Australia. At last, the “diplomatic insult” that so worried former Nationals leader, deputy prime minister and later ambassador to the Holy See Tim Fischer has been put to rest.
As the Washington Post notes, Culvahouse, a lawyer by training,

At the launch of Kevin Rudd’s weighty second volume of memoirs, the Canberra press gallery was in full-on cynicism mode.
In the Holder Room in the inner sanctums of Parliament House, Angus and Robertson, the publishers, had set up a stall selling copies of the book – Kevin Rudd, The PM Years